


you can't do this on your own

by TylahJayne



Series: rebirth of the soul [4]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Gen, james is sad, trans!James
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 05:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7921699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TylahJayne/pseuds/TylahJayne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“i am mine before i am anyone else’s alexander."</p>
<p>"i am everyone else’s before i am my own james."</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can't do this on your own

**Author's Note:**

> title from [Crywolf - Rising, Rising ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuLT_qAqTU0)

“i am mine before i am anyone else’s alexander."  
  
"i am everyone else’s before i am my own james."  
  
   
  
your name is james madison, and you don't know where to start.  
  
there are moments when you're back in the past, and the current time feels like an illusion.  
  
there are moments when the current time is so real that it's blinding, you are caught between two worlds, and you have power over neither of them.  
  
you are a single soul in the ocean that is the world around you. singular, irrelevant when excluded from the majority, there is no other way to phrase it. you are but a single piece of a puzzle, a picture incomplete without its counterparts.  
  
there is one of you and many pieces to your puzzle. at least you’re not alone when it comes to assembling, conforming, to create the bigger picture. you are a part of something much bigger than the sum of your parts, and the change in your pockets.  
  
you have learnt, that no one soul is worth the universe, but no one universe is worth less than a soul. it is a delicate balance that the human race rushes back and forth to compete with it.  
  
time is a delicate thing, you are gifted so much time, but in the long run, is it really much time? does wisdom come with years? or does wisdom come with the knowledge that the human race is constantly running out of time?  
  
if you could leave behind who you were in your previous life, you think you would. memories of your lives before either do not exist or have been squashed down so far into your memories that they are inaccessible. you try to exist on the fundamental property that who you were in your past life does not define you.  
  
however much you try to escape your past life, it sprints to catch up to you. you feel like you are living two life’s, flashbacks are common, and often do not provide any insight to your life before. seemingly days spent in the past add up to mere minutes in the current time.  
  
you are forever lost in a loop of stolen and borrowed time. for every day you live in the current time, you seem to live in the past an additional three.  
  
the time piles up, you mature faster, you are no longer a young mind. you seem to be four times your age. you know that even the notion of this is preposterous, but you can’t seem to give up on the idea. you guess that you’ve spent so much time believing it, that in some reality, it came true.  
  
you were young when you met thomas jefferson. you are around sixteen when you meet him. older by your made up realities standards, but does that really count? you choose to not believe so. he is rash and impulsive, and you couldn’t help but love him.  
  
you’d never met anybody as helpless as thomas jefferson. you had, but you chose to push those memories aside. they weren’t needed at this exact moment.  
  
thomas lacked a certain grace, a grace that haunted your memory and mocked you when you closed your eyes. a certain brand of graceless disarray that only one man could perfectly undertake.  
  
this man waltzed into your life, and you couldn’t help but accept him as a permanent fixture in your life. he might have been rash, but he reminded you of the simple things.  
  
“drink water james.”  
  
“take your binder off, it’s starting to get late, you know you can’t sleep in it.”  
  
“don’t forget your green notebook, it's got the chemistry notes you’ll need today in it.”  
  
he was your rock when you needed him, and for that you are grateful.  
  
you ignore what can’t be explained, like the force that’s pulling you towards new york, and push on. you graduate from high school with honours, side by side with thomas. the pair of you pack up your belongings and move to new york.  
  
thomas began looking at colleges, while you looked for something you could enjoy with the whole of your heart. apparently, there was a lot of things you could do in new york, and since neither of you had to worry about money, life was okay.  
  
not much changed, thomas still reminded you about the little things, and you kept trying to complete the puzzle by yourself. it wouldn’t work, the pieces slipped from your fingers and tumbled to the floor before you’d the chance to slip them into the place you thought that it fit.  
  
you weren’t alone for much longer, however, as other people you remembered seemed to slot themselves into your life. whether it was a nod in the street, or a suspected random person shooting you a wave on the street, both people you’d never met, and those both you and thomas were acquainted with made themselves known.  
  
pieces started slipping into place, without assistance, and without force. however, there were still some pieces that just wouldn’t click, no matter how hard you tried, or how long you spent around certain people.  
  
other things seemed to fall into a place, after a dinner date with someone who was reportedly a ghost.  
  
that’s the thing about people, you guess, they’re never really ghosts, just people who are lost by themselves in the great ocean we call the world.

**Author's Note:**

> as always u can find me at my main blog [here ](http://vodkaaunttylah.tumblr.com)


End file.
